The Fugitive Blacksmith and Other Essential Writings by James W.C. Pennington

This volume recovers the unjustly-forgotten African American abolitionist and minister, James W.C. Pennington. During the antebellum period, Pennington was an internationally-recognized intellectual, an exemplary African American figure. He was Yale Divinity School's first (unofficial) African American student, and his intellectual achievement took him to Europe, where he published a bestselling slave narrative and received an honorary Doctorate from Germany's oldest university. His writings, lectures, activism, and direct resistance make him one of the forgotten architects of the American antislavery movement. This volume is the first modern edition of any of Pennington's works, including his slave narrative and his monumental treatise on Black history, with a variety of his most impactful sermons, activist writings, and correspondence.

Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in the U.S. at Heidelberg University. He has written books and essays on a range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American literature, including Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity: Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana (2016).

Caitlin B. Smith is Assistant Professor of Early American Literature at St. Bonaventure University. She has published multiple journal articles on nineteenth-century American literature and religion, with a special focus on early freethinking societies and constructions of doubt.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own and We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For. Glaude is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University.